Rat Poison, Stolen Peaches, and a Car Ride: Inside the Most Unhinged Olympic Marathon in History

It is late August 1904 in St. Louis, Missouri. The sun beats down at over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and thick, yellow clouds of dust blanket an unpaved road. Thirty-two men set out to run nearly twenty-five miles. Only fourteen will reach the finish line alive and conscious.

Welcome to the 1904 Olympic Marathon, an event widely regarded as the most absurd and life-threatening athletic competition ever organized. Designed partly as a cruel scientific experiment by race organizers who wanted to test the limits of human dehydration, the race featured only one water station across the entire distance.

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What followed was pure, unadulterated chaos.

Nine miles into the torture test, American runner Fred Lorz doubled over with crippling stomach cramps. Instead of suffering on the side of the road, Lorz made a practical executive decision: he jumped into his manager’s automobile and rode comfortably for the next eleven miles. When the car broke down, Lorz simply stepped out, refreshed and rested, and jogged into the stadium to claim victory. He posed for photos with President Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter before revealing his entire run was just a "joke."

With Lorz disqualified, the title fell to Thomas Hicks. But Hicks was barely human by the final stretch. As he flagged near the twenty-mile mark, his aggressive trainers refused to let him stop. Instead of water, they administered a chemical cocktail consisting of raw egg whites, French brandy, and strychnine sulfate—commonly known as rat poison.

In small doses, strychnine acts as a violent nervous system stimulant. By the final lap, a gray-faced, hallucinating Hicks was being carried over the finish line by his trainers while his feet dragged in the dirt. Judges ruled that because his feet were moving, it counted as a victory.

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Meanwhile, the rest of the field was dealing with bizarre subplots. Cuban postman Félix Carvajal ran in street clothes and dress shoes after losing his money gambling in New Orleans. Hungry after a 40-hour fast, he paused mid-race to eat rotten green apples from an orchard, developed severe stomach cramps, took a peaceful nap on the side of the road, and still somehow managed to finish fourth.

Elsewhere on the course, Len Taunyane, one of the first Black South African Olympians, was running barefoot and pacing near the front when he was chased nearly a mile off course by a pack of aggressive feral dogs. He still managed a ninth-place finish.

Reflecting on the event, modern sports historians often debate whether the 1904 marathon was an athletic triumph or an act of institutional negligence. One commenter noted that it plays out like a comedy sketch written by someone who had never seen sports before. Another argued that it stands as a wild monument to human resilience under absolute operational failure.

The podcast hosts roll up their sleeves to break down every terrifying, hysterical detail of this iconic historical disaster on History Uncut.